But shortly after Thomas
Edison
electrified the world (pun intended), moving pictures began
capturing famous moments.

They often were re-enactments as well, but by the
actual people involved instead of stage actors, and within days or even
minutes of the actual event. (For instance, ribbon-cutting, bill-signing,
and hand-shaking ceremonies were often done several times to make sure
the press got good footage.)

This list was first posted in the spring of 2010.
By 2012, I noticed that a number of the links no longer connected
to anything. So I expect that within a few months, there will
again be broken links. If you find any, do me the favor of sending
me an email,
so that I can find a new source of that information.

The Earliest Moving Films

Our first link is in fact of a film made by Edison
in 1894; not momentous in content, but merely in its existence.

Long before Stallone invented "Rocky," Jack
Dempsey was making film history. You can see him fighting Jess
Willard in 1919.I can't help but thinking that it would have to be sports to motivate
the producers to combine sound with video.

The Great Depression and World War Two

George M. Cohan
did indeed "own Broadway." During the Great Depression, he
took on the highly controversial role (as portrayed by James Cagney)
of playing Franklin Roosevelt in "I'd
Rather Be Right
[than President.]"

In 1927, sound and motion had been linked,
and Al Jolson delivered his immortal message to the world: "You
Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet!" This was the first
time the audio was recorded on the same tape as the video.

And it was just in time to save the masses. When the depression
hit, movie theaters were clean, warm, and distracting. Escapism was big
business.

Black
Tuesday
and the Great
Depression
cannot be captured on film -- how can you compress a national crisis
of over a decade into a You Tube clip? Here are a few tries:

The photos
in this video
capture the decade better than any other short video I've
seen.
It has been said that some of the prints were staged or captioned
out of context. Regardless, they show the sentiment of the decade.

The
following footage of concentration camps is gruesome. Don't
click if you don't want to cringe.

While America was praising the heroic
achievement of Jesse Owens, we weren't treating African-Americans so
well at home. Marian
Anderson's contract to sing at the D.A.R.
hall in Washington DC was refused when the members finally noticed
that the renowned singer was black. Liberal Eleanor
promptly resigned from the group and
got Franklin to make amends by allowing Anderson
to sing at the Lincoln Memorial
. (Whether
the song is praise for the Roosevelts or a slap in the face of the D.A.R. (or
perhaps both) I do not know.)

The Cold War and
JFK

As Eddie Izzard mentioned,
after Russia lost 26,000,000 soldiers in World War Two, they decided
to take over most of Eastern Europe in order to build a buffer zone
between themselves and the west.
The
invasion of Hungary in 1956 was
filmed by many Austrians who were helping the Hungarians escape.

One of the earliest and
most famous targets of accusations of Communist spying was leveled
against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They
were sentenced to death
for crimes that many believe were falsified.

The primary agent
of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC] was Senator
Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin. (not to be confused with the later
Senator Eugene
McCarthy, D-Minnesota). Joseph McCarthy is almost
certainly the model for the anti-communist propagandist Senator
John Iselin
in the 1962 version of The
Manchurian Candidate
. [The 2004 version
is less clearly based on the McCarthy era.]

By the end of the decade,
McCarthy had been discredited, and America faced a new threat: the
Military-Industrial Complex. Many people credit this phrase as
an invention of 1960s radicals, but it
was in fact coined by President Dwight David Eisenhower, hero of
World War Two and a conservative Republican.

Eisenhower delivered
his farewell address three days before John Fitzgerald Kennedy took
office. Before being elected, JFK had to overcome extensive anti-Catholic
bigotry. This
speech of Kennedy's
before a meeting of southern Protestant ministers is a measure both of
the bias he faced and the brilliance with which he faced it.

Kennedy had a lot of big names in
his corner. Peter Lawford was a fan (and an in-law), as was Danny
Kaye. Judy Garland wore her "vote for Jack" button proudly. Marilyn
Monroe's relationship to Kennedy has been hypothesized ad
nauseam.

Frank Sinatra recorded
a record for his campaign;

Kennedy's brilliance
(and his father's connections?) won him the election. And like Abraham
Lincoln almost exactly 100 years earlier, he took office facing one
of the major issues of his presidency: the
Cuban
Missile Crisis.

Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev had already
expressed both a desire to de-escalate armaments and to assert Soviet
power. His
famous "shoe-banging" incident at the UN,
in which he
emphasized his speech with a loud thump, was much belittled in the
American press.

Kennedy's vision became reality six years after his death.
On July 16, 1969, Apollo
11
began its four day journey to the moon and
the most famous words since Al Jolson said "You Ain't Heard Nothin'
Yet" in 1927.

On November 22, 1963,
the course of American history was changed, not for the first time
nor for the last, but for the worst of all reasons: a conspiracy against
our own citizens. Anyone watching
the famed Zapruder film
can tell that Kennedy wasn't shot from the sixth floor of a building
behind him. Therefore he wasn't shot by Lee Harvey Oswald.

For anyone who wants
a reasonably realistic explanation of the Kennedy assassination,
I recommend Oliver Stone's film "JFK."

Regardless of what the movie and Jim
Garrison say, the
belief that
Oswald
and Ruby had FBI and CIA connections
is
persistent.

The New American Revolution

Whether the turmoil of
the 1960s and 70s is related to the growing distrust many young people
had for their government or is more directly related to the escalation
of the Viet Nam War (or whether those two are linked as Stone's "JFK" suggests),
it is undeniable that anti-war, civil rights, women's rights and gay
rights issues so dominated the latter portion of the 1960s as to lead
many people to take seriously the threat of revolution.

A lot of that revolution
started in and was reflected in the music of the era. But we're
not going to stray off to Beatle mania and the British invasion; this
page is intended to introduce you to the historical and political wonders
of You Tube that aren't primarily musical.

For instance, how many of us have seen Malcolm
X
-- not the movie, the man? His speeches, or at least the ones
I saw on You Tube, seem to be carefully
considered statements
about the deficiencies of the "one day things will change" policy
of Martin Luther King. Dr.
King's response
was equally well-reasoned.

While the early 1960s
were primarily focused on Civil Rights for blacks, other political
movements were forming. The
Civil Rights movement was linked to a more general human rights message
in Bob Dylan's song "If I Had a Hammer," the most famous
recording of which was by Peter,
Paul and Mary.

By 1968, so many events were happening
that we could hardly keep track of them as they happened. One too many
people believed that Dr.
King did indeed have a dream, and made
sure he died before that dream came true. Walter Cronkite, the
anchor not only of CBS Evening News but of our last real belief that
the news was believable, reported
the event.

When Bobby Kennedy ran
for President, his speeches, especially his victory speech at the California
primary, addressed the needs of a unified approach: "We
want to deal with our own problems within our own country, and we want
peace in Viet Nam." Three
minutes later Kennedy was shot on national television.

In 1969 eight protest leaders were charged
with Conspiracy to incite to riot. Most
commentators alleged that the charges are absurd, since the eight
had no common causes or goals, and didn't ever meet together. When
Bobby Seale was denied the right to defend himself at the trial, he
called the judge words I probably can't print here. As a result, he
was brought into a courtroom bound and gagged, and eventually was removed
from the courtroom. Seale served four years in jail
for contempt of court. The
trial was not televised.

In June of 1969 another group asserted its civil rights. Gay
people, at
first primarily drag queens, took a stand on Christopher Street in
New York in what eventually became known as the
Stonewall Riots,
named
after the bar in which the fighting began.

"There had been individual temporary
caucuses and conferences of women as early as 1964 when Stokeley
Carmichael made his infamous remark that "the only position
for women in SNCC is prone." But it was not until 1967 that
the groups developed a determined, if cautious, continuity and
began to consciously expand themselves."

Activist Holly Near, who had begun her political protests with Jane
Fonda's FTA movement, was the first person to link the various protestors
into a unity of people against the establishment through her music.

They All Fall Down

As the 1960s and 70s saw the growth of various political
movements, the later 1970s saw their demise.

Although Seale and Cleaver represented the Black Panthers,
their involvement with the DNC brought the anti-war faction into the picture.
As Holly Near had connected the draft of disproportionate numbers of Black
and Hispanic soldiers into the war, white anti-wart activists took the
infamous treatment of Bobby Seale into the heart of the anti-war movement.

With most of the Panthers in jail, in hiding, or killed,
along with the deaths of Malcolm X and Dr. King, the black freedom movement
had no strong center. Jesse
Jackson tried to fill the void, but he was
neither militant enough to serve as a voice for the Panthers or pacifist
enough to replace Dr. King.

The entanglement of the Back Civil Rights Movement and the
anti-Viet Nam War demonstrations rose to public prominence together. The
end of the war
also gave the black activists a less clear center about
which to fight.

One of the major issues connecting the Vietnam War to discrimination
against Blacks and Hispanics was the use of college attendance as a reason
to be excused from the draft. during the late 1960s and early 1970s, the
Department of Justice put serious pressure on colleges, especially public
schools in the South, to start admitting minorities if they wanted to keep
the federal financial aid. As a result, more minorities were in college
and excused from the draft. So not only was the war winding down, but the
reason for Blacks to use it as a major point of contention was also diminishing.

The end of the war and the advances made in college education
for minorities took a lot of the wind out of the sails of what Billy Joel
called "The
Angry Young Man
."

There were still four protest issues gaining some attention,
but since none of them was the center of focus of the young white man,
they got much less media attention.

The fight for Native American rights that gained so much
attention at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee was virtually destroyed by a poorly
designed protest by Marlon Brando that turned what should have been serious
issues into a media circus. Brando won the Oscar for best actor in "The
Godfather,"
and as a protest against the treatment of Native Americans, refused to
accept the award. Instead, he had Sacheen
Littlefeather reject the award
because of the mistreatment of Native Americans in he media. The stunt
backfired; once it was discovered that Ms.
Littlefeather was an actress,
the fact that she was also a Native American activist was completely obscured.
for the next decade, one could hardly speak about Native Americans without
the conversation turning into a comedy and a series of insults.

Cesar
Chavez's
work with migrant farmworkers, especially
people brought up from Mexico to work for the agricultural season and sent
home at the end of the season, earned him enormous fame. The workers he was
representing were eulogized in a song by Woody Guthrie called "Deportee,
"
After successfully organizing boycotts of grapes and lettuce, he succeeded
in organizing the United Farm Workers' Union. (From the Wiki article it appears
that he sometimes supported the goals of their Union and sometimes opposed
them.) His next major target was the Gallo vineyards. His
110 mile march got enormous coverage
,
and the ability to organize the workers and improve wages and living conditions
was considered a major victory. As with so many movements, the highly-publicized
win gave many people permission to stop fighting.

Chavez continued
to fight on behalf of farm workers, especially immigrant farmworkers (Braceros)
This silent video of
marchers
on their way to hear Chavez speak in 1979 gives
evidence to his ongoing commitment, but farm workers were old news by then
--the battle was over, victoriously, and mainstream attention turned to
other issues.

There were two big issues that never quite went away. One
can argue that it's because of the larger numbers of people that they represented;
one can argue that it's because the majority of the visible leaders were
white. Whichever the reason, the fights for equal rights for women and
for Lesbian and gay people lost most of their steam in the 70s, but never
quite disappeared altogether.

While the fight for women's rights was national and constitutional,
the fight for rights for Lesbians and gay men was being fought in a microcosm.
Individual cities throughout the United States were passing gay rights
laws, and it seemed that a definite momentum was beginning to build. San
Francisco elected the country's
first openly gay official,
Harvey Milk, in 1976. His election gave the anti-gay forces a focal point.
Panic-stricken reactionaries started a group called Save
Our Children,
and hired Anita Bryant
as their symbolic spokesperson. The movement that started in Dade County
Florida quickly became national, with the biggest focus on a state-wide
referendum in California known as Proposition
6.
As San Francisco became the focal point for gay rights, it also became
the focal point for anti-gay sentiment. Tension escalated to tragedy on
November 27, 1978
.
Dan White, another city supervisor, shot Mayor George Moscone, then city
supervisor Harvey Milk, in a manner that left little doubt that the verdict
would be would be first degree murder.
When the trial started, gay people were excluded from the jury, signaling
that the judge would be making decisions sympathetic to Dan White. When he
was acquitted on charges of first-degree murder, and found guilty of involuntary
manslaughter instead, the
riots that people had expected at the time of the killing finally erupted
.

The political losses as cities repealed gay rights bills,
and the overwhelming sense that gay people could not receive justice led
to a sharp decline in political activism among the lesbian and gay community.By
1980, what had been a national movement was again reduced to a handful
of local equal rights efforts.

The decline of the gay and women's movements were not the
only events two would dissolution people fighting for change. In December
of 1980, John Lennon
was killed
while entering his home at the Dakota
in New York. In March
of 1981, President Ronald Reagan, was shot while leaving a speaking engagement
at a hotel in Washington, DC. [The footage focuses on press secretary
press secretary Jim Brady, who was killed. As the news announcer mentions
a minute or so into the tape, President Reagan had already
been driven from the scene on the way to the hospital.] The death of press
secretary Jim Brady led to the passage of the Brady law, an effort to
limit the sale of handguns.

In May of
1981, Pope John Paul
II was shot
four times in an assassination attempt
as he was leaving St. Peter's Square. None of these incidents had any clear
political motivation, amplifying the sense of chaos and hopelessness
overtaking the country and the world.

Meanwhile, the women's liberation movement
and the ERA had lost most of its steam. Even though the time
permitted for passage of the constitutional amendment had been extended,
proponents could see that there was little chance of capturing
the required 38 states.

Ironically, as the battle for women's rights ground to a
halt, the most feminist TV show ever written began a seven year stretch
of dealing with political issues, women's rights, and controversy. In each
of its seven years, one of the two stars, Tyne Daley or Sharon Gless, won
the Emmy for best actress in a TV drama.

The show never had top ratings, but every effort
to cancel it brought such an outpouring of viewer response that the show
wound up being the strongest icon of women in the media.